As online education continues to grow, the academic integrity is called into question. How do you give the credit and certification to the right person?
Smowltech is a technology based start-up founded in late 2012 as a spin-off of Vicomtech-IK4, a prestigious European technology centre specialized in computer vision and IA. From the beginning, we’ve been focused on developing a user friendly eProctoring solution to avoid online learning fraude and improve academic integrity.
In such a complex and changing world due to technological evolution, organizations are required to use technology to improve the life quality of the people. At Smowltech, we aim to travel alongside institutions and students offering the best user experience in the continuous assessment process in online learning allowing universal access to education while maintaining academic integrity. Online education is here to stay and it’s revolutionizing the way we learn. Due to the transformation of our society and technology, a large number of jobs will be destroyed while new ones will be created, for this reason studying a career will not be enough to be prepared for the rest of our professional career. Therefore, the concept of lifelong learning should be embraced since people will have to be learning continuously to help organization to face new challenges.
This new paradigm will require people of any age to be in constant training. For this, flexible solutions that allow them to combine work, training and family conciliation will be demanded. These solutions will have to be user-centric, their way of learning, wherever and whenever they want. With this in mind, we not only work alongside institutions to provide the required technology to verify the identity of the students and monitor their behavior to keep academic integrity, but offer our support in the implementation and adaptation of our solution to the institution’s pedagogic methodology, aiding the management of the change, forming both students and teachers, and establishing the required protocols so that the students are conscious of the importance of keeping the same rigor that the onsite learning.
Smowltech is built on top of three essential pillars: Simplicity, Flexibility and Scalability. Smowltech aims to help organizations by building trust in their eLearning environments, providing a continuous eProctoring service using facial recognition, which enables organizations increase their eLearning offer with credibility and cost-effective. SMOWL is a practical and reliable solution for online user identification and monitoring. It consists in a new cyber-security service covering the need for a continuous, automatic and scalable authentication of online user’s identity and monitoring. The technology, based on continuous automatic facial recognition can be applied to numerous sectors.
SMOWL project is implemented into the e-learning growing market ( eLearning market 23%, fastest one in the education sector (LATAM, 14%, USA 6,7%)), where a substantial need has been detected for online proctoring and remote invigilation services. The overall objectives of this project is to test the solution in large scale pilots testing the scalability of the solution and look for the internationalisation of the company and enter new markets.
